Tag Archives: Raku

Day 1 – Dancer, Dasher and Dosh (LLM-powered shell commands)

Dancer, Dasher and the other reindeer work overtime on Christmas Eve delivering billions of gifts. Each year the DevOps elves try and make things flow a bit smoother. The team use dosh (Do-Shell) – a Raku-powered command-line utility for turning natural language into platform-friendly shell commands. Instead of remembering all those pesky command-line utilities andContinue reading “Day 1 – Dancer, Dasher and Dosh (LLM-powered shell commands)”

Day 18 – Happy™ Xmas

Christmas was fast approaching and Santa was starting to worry about all the presents being wrapped in time. Ensuring that he could quickly find the Elfmail address for all of the team was important to whip them into shape. Luckily, Rudolph [for it was he] had been learning raku and cro for some years nowContinue reading “Day 18 – Happy™ Xmas”

Day 16 – Revision gating in Rakudo core

The motivation One of the Rakudo features I worked on this year was to resolve an annoyance related to the Array.splice method. As reported in a GitHub issue called Array.splice insists on flattening itself: The author of the ticket tried all sorts of mechanisms to inform splice that the @newrow array should be inserted asContinue reading “Day 16 – Revision gating in Rakudo core”

Day 2 – WAT LLM coding tool do you want for Christmas?

Programming for a living used to be an active conversation between yourself, the computer, and your colleagues. This Christmas, a new guest is joining the programming party: the LLM. Large Language Models (LLMs) can talk a lot and, just like your eccentric uncle at Christmas, occasionally blurt out something bonkers. But do we want toContinue reading “Day 2 – WAT LLM coding tool do you want for Christmas?”

Day 25: Rakudo 2022 Review

In a year as eventful as 2022 was in the real world, it is a good idea to look back to see what one might have missed while life was messing with your (Raku) plans. Rakudo saw about 1500 commits this year, about the same as the year before that. Many of these were bugContinue reading “Day 25: Rakudo 2022 Review”

Day 22: He’s making a list… (part 1)

If there’s anything that Santa and his elves ought to know, it’s how to make a list. After all, they’re reading lists that children send in, and Santa maintains his very famous list. Another thing we know is that Santa and his elves are quite multilingual. So one day one of the elfs decided that,Continue reading “Day 22: He’s making a list… (part 1)”

Day 20: Sigils are an underappreciated programming technology

Sigils have a bit of a bad reputation. According to their detractors, sigils are “just a way of encoding type information” in variable names – basically a glorified version of apps Hungarian notation (which isn’t even the good kind of Hungarian notation). Maybe sigils served a purpose in the bad old days, but now we have fancy IDEs and editors can give us all the type information we might want, and these modern tools have made sigils obsolete.

Or so they say. But I disagree – as do many of the hackers whose perspectives and insights I value most.

So my goal in this post is to convince you that sigils are a powerful tool for writing clear, expressive code. In fact, I’ll go further: Sigils are a powerful tool for clear communication in general – that they’re useful for programming is just an application of the more general rule.

Day 18: Something else

Santa was absent-mindedly going through the Rakudo commits of the past weeks, after hearing about the new 2022.12 release of the Rakudo compiler. And noticed that there were no commits after that release anymore. Had all the elves been too busy doing other stuff in the Holiday Season, he wondered. But, in other years, the Raku coreContinue reading “Day 18: Something else”